Email marketing gives new options for list segmentation in addition to classic segmentation methods such as demographic and psychographic segmentations. This Q&A, with Lucy Conlan of cScape reviews these options and also includes discussion of how to treat the "emotionally unsubscribed" list members who are a natural part of every email list.
This month's Q&A is with my colleague Lucy Conlan from the cScape Customer Engagement Unit. Lucy was previously senior marketing manager at the UK"€™s premier arts centre, the Barbican, where she worked on Customer Relationship Management and campaign integration activity, including on the re-launch of the award-winning Barbican website.
Q1. How important do you think it is to segment your Email list?
Lucy Conlan, cScape: The very size of an organisation"€™s email list can be a political minefield. Senior…
For effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the importance of building quality backlinks from third party sites to your site is well known. Applying online public relations techniques to support backlink creation is now a core part of the service for all competent SEO agencies and PR agencies.
But how do you assess the approach of the SEO company or improve your own internal process? This interview outlines best practice in using online PR to support SEO from the SEO agency perspective.
In this month"€™s interview I talk to Phil Robinson, the founder and Managing Director of Search Engine Marketing agency Clickthrough Marketing about the processes and tools his SEO team apply to take advantage of online PR. My questions and Phil"€™s answers will step you through some of the…
This month I"€™m pleased to interview Richard Kershaw who is an active affiliate who uses paid and organic search to drive sales through his clients"€™ affiliates programmes.
I was keen to tap into Richard"€™s expertise from following his commonsense comments on the UK Netmarketing discussion forum and his own Quality Nonsense Blog. I also wanted to get an affiliates perspective on trends in affiliate marketing.
Q1. How do you see the balance between the importance of SEO and PPC focused affiliates changing in the future? (With merchants getting more refined in paid search and putting more attention into SEO plus the search engines apparently trying to exclude affiliates, will this make life too difficult for small-to-mid size affiliates?)
[Richard Kershaw]: As far as PPC is concerned, there"€™s a pincer movement between Google and merchants. The AdWords platform is getting more complex, while traffic prices are on the up thanks to…
The concept of segmentation, is of course, well-known to marketers but it is a term increasingly applied within web analytics. While analytics specialists may be up-to-speed on online segmentation options, most marketers won't have time to get-to-grips with the options.
So, I'm pleased to be present this interview with analytics specialist Hugh Gage to enlighten us about the online segmentation options.
For example segmentation is now a prominent tool within the latest versions of Google Analytics and Visual Sciences and it has always been easy to create granular segmentations in ClickTracks.
In this interview, I talk to web analytics consultant Hugh Gage of Engage Digital who was previously a senior analyst at Logan Tod & Co and before that Head of Online Planning and Buying at Manning Gottlieb OMD.…
This E-marketing Essentials Interview with Fred Bassett of digital strategy consulting strategy firm Blue Latitude outlines a structured approach to online marketplace analysis in order to inform digital marketing strategy.
Whether it's business strategy, marketing strategy or digital strategy, understanding your marketplace positioning is crucial. For traditional business or marketing strategy, environment mapping, situation analysis or marketplace analysis, call it what you will, is a well established approach.
But what is the best approach for online marketplace analysis? It seems to me that this core part of digital strategy is often neglected despite all the rich data available from web analytics and audience media consumption data from the likes of Hitwise and Comscore.
So I was delighted to be taken through a rigorous methodology for e-marketplace analysis and mapping…
Website security is probably not top-of-mind for most Internet marketing managers, but in this interview, Colin Hall of web security specialists Watson Hall shows the problems that can arise and outlines how you can reduce the risks you face.
Which website security issues should you consider when commissioning a new site or auditing an existing site. In this E-marketing Essentials interview I ask web security specialist Colin Hall of web site security consultants Watson Hall what you should consider.
Q1. I know you believe that security is often a relatively neglected requirement in website commissioning, design and implementation. Why do you think this is the case?
[Colin Watson] It's not something many people commissioning a website are familiar enough with. Many people often only associate web security with two things... 'viruses' and 'HTTPS' (pages on websites where the data is encrypted in transit) and therefore believe that having anti-virus software and a…
In this E-marketing Essentials interview I ask web analytics expert Neil Mason for his thoughts on how we should assess social media sites and site channels. Many are talking today about Web 2.0 initiatives, but how do you monitor and improve their effectiveness.
Neil Mason, director and consultant at consumer analytics company Applied Insights is well regarded as a leading commentator on web analytics through his Analysing Customer data column on Clickz, and his work for the Web Analytics Association.
I have known Neil as a fellow web consultant for several years from when we have been speaking at conferences from E-consultancy and E-metrics. We haven't had a chance to catch-up FTF for a while, but I was keen to interview him by email get an update on using web analytics to assess customer participation Web 2.0 sites.
Q1. For me, community, participation…
In this E-marketing Essentials interview, I ask web design and usability specialist Paul Rouke for the low-down on findability, which is increasingly applied as a discipline within usability projects, partly prompted by Peter Morville"€™s book "€œAmbient Findability"€.
We define Findability, look at Findability methodologies, some of the biggest mistakes to avoid and as include some practical tips.
Thanks to Paul Rouke for sharing his experience of findability applied to different types of commercial sites. Paul has over 8 years of experience in improving usability for transactional E-commerce sites based on over 6 years as lead user experience designer at Littlewoods Shop Direct (www.lwsdg.co.uk) and more recently with his web design and usability company PRWD (www.prwd.co.uk).
He also writes at www.paulrouke.co.uk on usability, user experience and information architecture.
What is findability?
Q1. What do you see as findability? Why is…
In this interview we look at the major SEO trends and innovation including personalised search, social media, vertical search and paid linking.
With thousands of posts weekly on the main search engine marketing portals like SearchEngineLand and compilations of "€˜must-read"€™ search blogs numbering in the hundreds, it can be tricky to spot the changes which will make a real difference to your search engine marketing efforts.
In this interview, I talk to an expert who has to sift through the seo blogs and identify the developments which will make a real difference to his clients. Andrew Girdwood is Head of Search at bigmouthmedia who as part of the Global Media Group have hundreds of search marketing clients from SME's to major global brands.
Andrew has been in Search for over nine years…
Eyetracking research shows us that visitors evaluate a web page in a fraction of a second and will often click within a few seconds. So, in many senses, success in digital marketing is down to how well you craft your digital communications to engage the visitor on your site and third-party sites.
So how do you approach engaging your online customers, is there any research to back up your approach and who is doing this well? In the first of my E-marketing Excellence interviews, I interviewed Richard Sedley, then Director of the Customer Engagement Unit at design agency, cScape.
The imperative of customer engagement
Q1. [Dave Chaffey] The customer engagement concept isn"€™t new. Why is there an increased focus on it today both in the US and in Europe?
[Richard Sedley] The increased importance of customer engagement is a result of a number of things dovetailing together including:
Media fragmentation, at least in the short term, has…
